My Personal Calendar
Some years ago I started noting in my calender the dates that friends and others important to me had died. (In the latter category are people like Flannery O’Connor.) I make these “repeating events,” which means that every year onthat date their names appear.
These dates include family: Susan, my father, my stillborn sister, Susan’s parents, a nephew, some aunts and uncles, some grandparents. They include teachers: Father Ossorgin from St. John’s College, for instance, and Robert Sacks,the tutor who wrote commentaries on Genesis and Job that (if I haven’t yet) I am going to recommend to you. They include theologian Robert Jenson, whose death nine years ago was last week, and the sublime Francisco de Vitoria (Aug. 12, 1546). Along with O’Connor, they include T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien. They don’t have to include C. S. Lewis, because I always remember him on Nov. 22, his death having been on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination.
Of late I’ve been noticing my calendar is getting crowded, although still there are many more birthdays than deaths. It’s been a half-century since I first read the lines from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” But fifty years ago the lines were more, shall we say, hypothetical. I remember my father saying, maybe twenty years ago, that a large number of his friends now lay six feet under ground. Now that he is one of them, I feel it more. A minor surprise hits me when I looking at my calendar. “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Christian calendars traditionally remember saintly people on the day they died. This is a more important date than their birth—of course, most people until recent centuries did not know the day of their birth. (I remember my surprise at learning this fact about Columbus.) And of course none of us knows the date of our own death. But faith has thought of that day as our birthday into heaven, our birth into eternal life. Without I hope undue presumption, I do think of the departed that I’ve written in my calendar as potential saints, for whom speaking of their “passing” will not be a euphemism for “dying.” Rather, it will indeed be the day of their passing from this world into the next.
I started noting these days when I got my first Palm (the IIIxe). Noting such days as are important to you would be even easier now, should you want to take it up.
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Out & About. The fall theology lecture will be Sun. Oct. 4 at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. My topic is: "What's Salvation Have to Do with It? Reflections after the Camino." This will be in the Great Hall, with responses from Dean Tom Smith and the Rev. Kate Smith, who have also walked the Camino. Then time for Q&A and a reception.
Good Books & Good Talk: The second session of our fall discussion of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov will be Sun. Oct. 11, at 5 p.m., to discuss Part Two of the novel. This will also be at St. Matthew's in the Great Hall.